Having to type .com extension in safari (snow leopard)

Same question (.com in Safari)

I had decided to switch to Firefox for a while and finally decided to switch back to Safari when I upgraded to Snow Leopard (since I can't stand the lack of 'Services' support in FF.) Right away when I switched, I noticed I couldn't just type "google" or "macosxhints" or anything without the ".com" (unless I had visited one of those sites recently in which case the autocomplete took care of it.) I remember for a fact that this worked when I used it a long time ago as one of my favorite features when I switched to Mac was that I could always just hit return and it would immediately add ".com" - I didn't even have to hit CTRL-Enter like I do on IE in Windows.

I did a whole lot of searching and found a lot of people with the same question but no answers. A lot of people suggested it might be ISP or DNS related but I'm 90% sure it's not. I've had the same ISP and have been using their default DNS servers for years, and plus when this was working, it worked only in Safari - definitely not in IE (if I typed "google" in IE, it would say "Looking up host google..." for like 10 or 20 seconds, then it would just do a web search for the word google.)

I hope someone can provide some help. If not a hidden setting to enable this, perhaps a plug-in/add-on?

 

Add these IP adresses to the DNS Servers list in System Pref>Network>Advanced>DNS

208.67.220.220
208.67.222.222

It redirects typed urls to OpenDNS who add the .com and send the address on.

 

This is a change Comcast made to your Internet service. They're making shortcut names like "google" resolve to their search page in order to get a little extra cash for the click-thru.

 

You can turn it off.

-Log into Comcast account
-Go to Users and Settings
-Find the box to the right with "My devices"
-Edit
-Disable Domain Helper
-reboot router

Should work the way you want it now.

 

Re: Having to type .com extension in safari (snow leopard)

Wow, thanks for the workaround, @cosmokanga2 ! I guess if I'd thought about it, I would've realized that custom DNS servers would do the trick (actually I did think about it as mentioned in my post... so I don't know why I didn't try this before.) I'm still 99% certain that this used to be a feature of Safari (see my post above) and they removed it at some point for some strange reason. After following everything on macosxhints.com for a while, I've come to the conclusion that Apple seems to like to remove little-known features from their OS/Applications for whatever reason.

I'd be interested to know if the Comcast thing above was the problem for @Slov and if the solution provided by @miles01110 worked for him. This was not my issue (I'm not even on Comcast and was not being forwarded to any page - I just got a not found page after a 30 second timeout.)